@fractaleblog@masto.comversive.com2025-10-14 08:52:56
Super intéressant, quoiqu'un peu flippant :
https://www.futura-sciences.com/planete/actualites/nature-cecite-botanique-ce-phenomene-invisible-fragilise-notre-lien-nature-126086/
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-08-11 13:30:26
Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy
@arXiv_mathAP_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-08 08:28:52
Transition from Continuous to Jumping Solutions in 2D Quasi-static Elastic Contact Problems with Coulomb Friction: the Mathematics Underlying the Onset of Brake Squeal
Patrick Ballard, Flaviana Iurlano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04863
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-29 10:14:07
Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and Relational Theory
Yunhao Yuan, Jiaxun Zhang, Talayeh Aledavood, Renwen Zhang, Koustuv Saha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22505
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange2025-07-24 21:10:04
Just put a 5.3mm SOIC8 on a quick and dirty test board for the first time in forever.
I needed a SPI flash, it was a one-off, and I've been meaning to get rid of a bunch of W25Q80BV's from circa 2012 that are bulky and too small for a modern FPGA bitstream. And I pretty much always use DFN/QFN/LGA/BGA parts these days, I literally can't remember the last time I used a SOIC.
The footprint is so old that the 3D model path is an absolute path on my old NFS server, before…
@arXiv_mathAG_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-24 08:30:00
Upper bounds for graded betti numbers of projective schemes in the first nontrivial strand
Doyoon Ha, Minjae Kwon, JeongDon Lee, Jinhyung Park
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17231 h…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-25 10:57:58
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
@arXiv_astrophEP_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-26 10:25:47
TOI-2322: two transiting rocky planets close to the stellar rotation period and its first harmonic
M. J. Hobson, A. Su\'arez Mascare\~no, C. Lovis, F. Bouchy, B. Lavie, M. Cretignier, A. M. Silva, S. G. Sousa, H. M. Tabernero, V. Adibekyan, C. Allende Prieto, Y. Alibert, S. C. C. Barros, A. Castro-Gonz\'alez, K. A. Collins, S. Cristiani, V. D'Odorico, M. Damasso, D. Dragomir, X. Dumusque, D. Ehrenreich, P. Figueira, R. G\'enova Santos, B. Goeke, J. I. Gonz\'alez Her…
@arXiv_csNI_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-19 08:18:31
1Q: First-Generation Wireless Systems Integrating Classical and Quantum Communication
Petar Popovski, \v{C}edomir Stefanovi\'c, Beatriz Soret, Israel Leyva-Mayorga, Shashi Raj Pandey, Ren\'e B{\o}dker Christensen, Jakob Kaltoft S{\o}ndergaard, Kristian Skafte Jensen, Thomas Garm Pedersen, Angela Sara Cacciapuoti, Lajos Hanzo
https://
@arXiv_hepph_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-28 09:02:21
Return of the Lepton Number: Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production and the Revival of the Shi-Fuller Mechanism
Cannon M. Vogel, Helena Garc\'ia Escudero, Julien Froustey, Kevork N. Abazajian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18752
